Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

But his is a mind also easily distracted.

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.

I need to know you’ll be safe when I’m not here to see to it.

How hard were the bones in the hand of an adult, how tender and soft the flesh of a child, how easy to bend and strain those young, unfinished bones.

It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.

And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.